Landslide, floods kill two in Assam; parts of Arunachal cut off

Officials said the water levels of the Brahmaputra and Barak, and several of its tributaries were rising on Monday as the State Disaster Management Authority (SDMA) put the number of flood-hit people at 3.55 lakh across 13 districts.

A six-year-old girl was killed when a landslide buried her house in Guwahati while another girl drowned in Assam as floods and landslides triggered by incessant rains continued to disrupt life in the Northeast on Monday. Class I student Dipeeka Barman was getting ready for school, a day before her summer vacation, when a landslide buried her tin-roofed bamboo house in Guwahati’s Panikhaiti area. She died on her way to a hospital while her younger sister was rescued with a fractured leg. Earlier, two-year-old Pallabi Narai drowned in flood-hit Lakhimpur district. The body of Mahendra Dekaraja, who was washed away at Kaki in Hojai district on Saturday evening, was recovered on Monday.

Kamrup (Metro) district administration on Monday asked people living in vulnerable locations to shift to safer places in view of possibility of more landslides due to rains. Over 50,000 people have been living on the city’s encroached hills, most of which are either reserved forests or government land. Rampant earth-cutting has led to landslides during the monsoon.

Officials said the water levels of the Brahmaputra and Barak, and several of its tributaries were rising on Monday as the State Disaster Management Authority (SDMA) put the number of flood-hit people at 3.55 lakh across 13 districts. Karimganj district remained the worst affected with the SDMA estimates saying over 2.12 lakh people remained hit. In Lakhimpur, over 92,000 were affected. About 21,000 people had been shifted to 77 relief camps across the state.

In Arunachal Pradesh, incessant rain triggered a series of landslides and cut off road communication to several districts. The road between Itanagar and Naharlagun remained cut off since Saturday with a landslide taking away its major portion.